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Social Science Research Methods and Perspectives

In: Social Issues

Submitted By sammyloo
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Social Science Research
Within the disciplines of sociological and cultural anthropology, research methods have similarities and differences based on philosophical roots that determine how a researcher will interact with study subjects to produce data or aesthetic judgments for an holistic understanding of individual or societal behavior. To what degree researchers will interact with participants is determined in two approaches that either promotes positivism or constructivist viewpoints. Positivism, according to Williamson (2006), considered as the investigation of human and social phenomena by observable and measureable methods, produces quantitative and reproducible data. In the viewpoint of positivism, data is obtained from the contextual origin and knowledge is determined as an external reality, one that is not integrated with the contextual milieu or qualitative variances (Williamson, 2006). According to Nomalungelo (2012), the positivist viewpoint is aligned with traditional western-based science, limiting in its integration of research with other qualitative approaches, paradigms and world views.
Conversely, constructivism, as described by Nomalungelo (2012), is knowledge produced from intersection of human interaction and social processes, resulting in dynamic development of qualitative knowledge as the viewer creates varying interpretations from a continuously shifting, contextual social reality. Therefore, the discovery of new meanings and realities are reached by various observers, so that no one perspective mediates the reality. In sociology, according to Tischler (2011), the objective is to engage the scientific method acquiring better knowledge and understanding of human behavior in social situations, thus looking for patterns and predictability of behavior among people and society. Regarding cultural anthropology, social scientists study

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